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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26332678">an-Nayyir</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/taxicab12/pseuds/taxicab12'>taxicab12</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>more to me than you can dream [17]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Joe loves the stars, M/M, Wikipedia levels of astronomical accuracy, and he loves his family</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 13:28:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,221</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26332678</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/taxicab12/pseuds/taxicab12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe remembered little about his childhood. It was a blur, a millennia away from where he was.</p><p>But, even when he could no longer remember his father’s face, no longer remember his voice or his laugh, he remembered his hand, how it looked pointed at the night sky, tracing the constellations with patience.</p><p>And Joe remembered his own voice, childlike in pitch and topic. “Tell me about the stars, Baba,” he begged, more than once.</p><p>And his father would point that hand, calloused, but strong, at the sky and they would stare at it until his mother called them inside.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andy | Andromache of Scythia &amp; Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Booker | Sebastien le Livre &amp; Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani &amp; Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman &amp; Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>more to me than you can dream [17]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1878034</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>225</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>an-Nayyir</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Joe remembered little about his childhood. It was a blur, a millennia away from where he was.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">But, even when he could no longer remember his father’s face, no longer remember his voice or his laugh, he remembered his hand, how it looked pointed at the night sky, tracing the constellations with patience.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">And Joe remembered his own voice, childlike in pitch and topic. “Tell me about the stars, Baba,” he begged, more than once.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">And his father would point that hand, calloused, but strong, at the sky and they would stare at it until his mother called them inside.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">He wasn’t sure when his father died exactly, or how, but Yusuf certainly hadn’t been a fully grown man yet. He did remember the night he found out the news, or perhaps it was days or weeks or years after he heard, he went out to the garden to cry with no one but the stars as his witness.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">The stars weren’t out when he himself died, something he might’ve regretted if he hadn’t been so focused on the man who’d killed him. But then, he lived, and as the two of them fought and killed each other again and again, the stars began to rise, only sunrise bringing them peace.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">They usually slept through the night and traveled in the day, and Yusuf got the sleep that he was sure he still needed, but sometimes he would step out into the starlight for just a few minutes, until Nicolò beckoned him back to bed.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Once in a while, when they passed through an area where the locals wouldn’t take well to one or both of them, they traveled by night. These nights, Yusuf would hold a hand up to the sky, tracing the stars as they walked and whispering their names to his lover until he was distracted by a beauty a little closer than the stars in the sky.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“That,” he said the first of those nights, one hand to the sky, the other swinging in Nicolò’s as they walked, “is an-Nasaqān. The two arrays.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Is there anything you don’t know, my love?” Nicolò asked with a laugh.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“What do you mean?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“You know art and poetry and mathematics, how to wage war, how to bargain, how to cook, and now you know the stars? Is there anything more?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Oh, I hope so,” he said, smiling back. “How boring it would be if I learned everything.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">They made camp and watched the sunrise. Yusuf forgot the stars, choosing instead to trace the constellations on his lover’s back.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">When they found the others, Yusuf often spent nights at Quynh’s side, both of them tracing constellations, teaching each other the names in their native tongues and arguing when their constellations didn’t line up.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“That is al-Fard,” he said one night when the others had already gone to sleep. “The solitary one.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“How lonely,” Quynh said, her voice soft and genuine. “How lucky we are to not be so alone.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">He put an arm around her shoulder, less because of the night chill than the overwhelming love in his heart. “How lucky indeed.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">They stayed up late into the night, their laughter rousing unhappy companions from sleep more than once, Quynh holding him close in a way that no star could ever do.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Andy never understood their obsession with the sky and it wasn’t until they sat on the deck of an English ship, the sky feeling like a cruel reminder, that she turned to him and told him her people’s names for the stars, the stories they told of heroes placed in the sky for all to see.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">And Joseph knew what she would say next, knew the defeat in her eyes intimately, so he didn’t let her speak.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“That is al-Qā'id,” he said, raising a hand to the sky. “The leader of the mourning maidens.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Andy pulled him into her arms, not shedding tears, though that would come later. In that moment, despite their skin pressing together, Andy seemed so impossibly far away that she made the stars seem nearby.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">It was Sebastien that pulled her from her sorrow, well over a hundred years later. She was not in constant tears for that time, but his arrival changed something in her, made her forget, at least for a minute, her own tragedies.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Joseph respected him for that, even if the man was too wrapped up in his sorrow and his drink to ever care. He wasn’t the type to sit out on the porch and look at the sky, but he did one night anyway, a flask at his side.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“That is al-Ghumaişā,” he said, though Sebastien hadn’t asked, or said anything at all. His hand trembled. “The bleary-eyed one.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“So?” He asked, taking a drink.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“So nothing. It’s just what it’s called where I’m from.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Well, we’re a long way from there.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Not compared to the distance to the stars. Just as the light of the stars reaches us, the light of my home will always reach me. As will yours.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“My home doesn’t have so much light.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Joseph put a hand on his shoulder. They said that stars were burning, bright balls of gas and fire. He knew little of that, but he looked at his friend and knew he would one day burn brighter than any star if only he could let the light in.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">In the 1960’s, Joe spent one year studying astronomy at a university in America. He told Nile this one night as they sat out in front of their safe house. It was only meant as the backstory to something silly Nicky had done, but she latched onto this detail.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Astronomy,” she said. “I would’ve thought you would study literature or art or something.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“What is the sky if not poetry made physical?” He smiled, turning his head up at it.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Tell me about the stars,” she said, and for a moment, he was a child again, learning the stars for the first time.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">He froze for that moment, joy filling his heart.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Are you okay?” Nile asked.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Perfect,” he said, and when he spoke again he didn’t tell her the silly Latin names the American university had used. He spoke the names his father had taught him, under the same sky a thousand years before. He raised a hand, calloused, but strong, to the sky. “That is an-Nayyir. The bright one.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“An-Nayyir,” Nile repeated, her pronunciation imperfect, but close enough.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Joe threw his head back in laughter.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Did I butcher it that badly?” She blushed.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“No, no.” He took her hand in his. “No, I just... I feel young again, for the first time in a very long time.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Young?” She asked. “How come?”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Because the stars have been there since I was a child. I am an infant in comparison. A boy again, at my father’s side.”</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Your father?” She looked surprised.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“He taught me all the stars,” Joe said.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">Her smile was brighter than even the brightest star.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">He looked through the window at Andy and Nicky, laughing in the kitchen, wearing the same bright smile. He knew he was the same way, knew that even broken and hurt and scattered, they would always shine that bright.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">What a beautiful constellation they all made.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">“Teach me,” Nile said.</span>
</p><p class="p2">
  <span class="s1">He did.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>These are all, according to Wikipedia and a couple other sites, real Arabic names for constellations. There were so many pretty names I actually had a couple that didn’t fit in this fic so this was super fun</p></blockquote></div></div>
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